In the last blog, I asked you to reflect on if your current daily life activities (occupation, schooling) are allowing you adequate time and energy to focus on your recovery.
In this blog, I am going to finally discuss the pros and cons of taking some time out. Here is them in list form:
Pros:
You have time
You have energy
You have sleep
You remove yourself from unhelpful social contact
Autopilot is disrupted.
Cons:
You spend your newly available free time distracting yourself with other things to avoid engaging in recovery
‘In recovery’ becomes a way of life
You lose a sense of normality
You lose social contact
Now, to delve into these a little further, let’s begin with the Pros:
Time
In the early months of proper recovery, you will need time to devote to what recovery reallyrequires: eating lots, responding to mental hunger, and resting. These certainly aren’t things that are taken away past those initial months, but they are usually demanded by the body more intensely as you get the ball rolling, compared to when your body feels safer, further out of energy deficit, and less ‘on a knife edge’.
Forcibly removing things that occupy your time can result in a wonderful loss of valid (sounding) excuses. There is no excuse for having the same lunch as always because you were too short on time to prepare something different. There is no excuse for forgetting an element of a snack because there wasn’t enough time to grab it whilst you were flying out the door several hours earlier in the pre-work frenzy. There is no excuse for failing to go shopping, and cupboards conveniently only offering limited options. And so on.
There is also time to put towards engaging in valuable resources (like highly insightful blog posts…) which otherwise might be bookmarked as ‘read later’ due to post-work fatigue. Or, if you do have access to them, it allows time for attendance of therapy/coaching sessions, which often require travel time, preparation time, homework or reflective activities if we wish to get the most possible out of them.
Energy
In this spare time, you have more energy to devote to what recovery requires.
The toll physical repair takes on your body is significant, hence why it is extremely common to feel more exhausted when recovery is genuinely embarked upon, and the body no longer is running on the fumes of energy deficit.
Additional to the physical repair, the mental tax of undoing all eating disorder rules is substantial. Though the changes made will result in boundless freedom, in this interim period, a structure is being dismantled that has, probably for some time, been instrumental in your ability to cope, part of your personality, woven into every routine and what people have come to expect from you.
When work is paused, energy which would usually be spent in these areas can be redirected here.
Rather than spending strained mental energy on meeting project deadlines, on responding to emails, troubleshooting the daily problems, travel, niceties and formalities, energy be dedicated and streamlined to the one thing that will make all of those things effortless in the future.
I would go as far as saying that without liberating yourself from roles that demand your mental and physical energy, it may be impossible to have enough vigour to put towards being consistently resilient.
Sleep
As outlined above, recovery absorbs a huge amount of mental and physical energy. This means that initially, recovery often involves an awful lot of sleeping in order to genuinely replenish reserves. I spent a lot of time in my early recovery napping.
Unhelpful social contact
In the months before I took time out of Uni, I was living with a guy whose life purpose it was to ‘get big’. Reflecting on it now, his mannerisms were eerily similar to that of an individual with an servere eating disorder. He weighed every last morsel of his food. He tracked all of his calories. He gymmed daily, without fail. He body checked – intensely - multiple times per day in front of me. And he certainly had extreme body dysmorphia.
The other guy I was living with at the time was a doctor in training – who came from a very privileged background. Though he ate well, he had a whole lot of that privilege pent up in his food choices, and this meant he had food judgement on levels I had never before, nor since experience. My decision to take time out allowed me to be in a bubble of safety for some time, until the point I was less vulnerable to influences from my external environment and firmer in my own resolve.
Office conversations about diets, staff room chit-chat about new exercise routines or general diet-culture-influenced comments overheard in the corridor can be almighty unhelpful when echoing the same disordered spiel that the ED cassette already plays. Taking yourself out of these locations for a short while can allow a helpful temporary avoidance of that.
Autopilot is disrupted.
When the hamster wheel of my life continued, it was incredibly hard to acquire any sense of urgency about making recovery actually happen now. When you’ve given yourself a set period of time off, meaningful action is genuinely needed at a consistent rate.
You have a seemingly uncomfortable amount of available time and space which means actions have to be done more consciously, rather than just swept over. Each moment matters in recovery, and removing the possibility of simply ‘going through the motions’ allows for attention to be placed on individual moments, which add up to that larger picture.
The next and penultimate blog post will cover the possible cons of taking time out, before the final blog post attempts to tie everything together. If you're ready for that, here it is.
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